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Despite its complaints about the size of the fine, Cloudflare said the principles at stake “are even larger” than the financial penalty. “Piracy Shield is an unsupervised electronic portal through which an unidentified set of Italian media companies can submit websites and IP addresses that online service providers registered with Piracy Shield are then required to block within 30 minutes,” Cloudflare said.
Cloudflare warns of “widespread overblocking”
Cloudflare said Piracy Shield relies on a system provided to Italy’s government by SP Tech, an arm of the law firm that represents Serie A and other major beneficiaries of the law. The system has no judicial oversight, transparency, due process, or redress for erroneous blocking, Cloudflare said.
“Global connectivity is too important to be governed by ‘black boxes’ with 30-minute deadlines that result in widespread overblocking with no means of redress,” Cloudflare said.
AGCOM rejected Cloudflare’s arguments when it issued the fine, saying that the required blocking would impose no risk on legitimate websites because the targeted IP addresses were all uniquely intended for copyright infringement. AGCOM also said in January that Piracy Shield had disabled over 65,000 domain names and about 14,000 IP addresses in AGCOM in the previous two years.
Cloudflare and others have pointed to failures with Piracy Shield, such as a mistaken blocking of Google Drive in October 2024. Google has also been ordered to block pirate sites at the DNS level. In a September 2025 report, researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands found “hundreds of legitimate websites unknowingly affected by blocking” in what they called “a conservative lower-bound estimate.”
AGCOM decisions can be appealed in the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio in Rome. As for what happens if Cloudflare loses the appeal, the company previously threatened to discontinue certain services in Italy and remove all of its servers from the country.
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